Char · Salvelinus namaycush
Lake Trout
Also called Togue, Mackinaw, Laker.
Short answer
The lake trout is the largest char in North America, a deep-water fish with pale spots on a dark body and a deeply forked tail. It is catchable on a fly only in the few weeks after ice-out, when it comes into the shallows, and it grows larger than any other fish in this guide.
How to identify a lake trout
- Pale spots on dark
- Cream or grey spots on a dark green-grey body, often with a marbled appearance. Char patterning.
- Deeply forked tail
- The quickest separation from brook trout, which has a square tail.
- No red or pink
- No red spots, no pink stripe. A plain fish compared with the trouts.
- Size
- Simply larger than anything else in most of the lakes it lives in.
What a lake trout is
Lake trout are a cold, deep, slow-growing fish of the northern lakes, and for most of the year they live far below anything a fly line can reach. The exception is the window after ice-out, when the whole lake is cold and lake trout move into the shallows to feed, and for a few weeks they are one of the great fly-rod fish of the north. They are extremely long-lived — decades, in some populations — and slow to replace themselves, which is why big ones are usually released. In Maine they are called togue, in the upper Midwest lakers, and in the Rockies mackinaw.
- Native to
- Native to the deep cold lakes of Canada, the Great Lakes, New England and the northern Rockies.
- Typical size
- Five to fifteen pounds commonly, and far larger in the big northern lakes. The largest freshwater char in North America.
- What they eat
- Fish, almost exclusively, once past juvenile size. Smelt, ciscoes, whitefish and juvenile trout.
Where lake trout live
The Great Lakes, Maine and the Adirondacks, the deep lakes of Minnesota and the Boundary Waters, and the high reservoirs and natural lakes of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. Introduced where it is not native, sometimes disastrously.
Fly fishing in Maine Fly fishing in Minnesota Fly fishing in Wyoming Fly fishing in Montana Fly fishing in New Hampshire
Conservation status
Secure overall, and in several western lakes a serious problem — lake trout introduced into Yellowstone Lake devastated the native Yellowstone cutthroat, and large-scale netting programmes now run to suppress them. Some waters require anglers to kill lake trout rather than release them.
Protected status and the rules that follow from it are set state by state and change. Before you fish, check the current regulations for the water you are standing in — this page is a starting point, not a legal reference.
How to catch lake trout
Fish the shallows in the weeks after ice-out, with a big streamer on a sinking line, retrieved slowly along drop-offs and rocky points. Later in the year they go deep and the fly rod stops being the right tool. Check local rules carefully: in waters where lake trout are an invasive problem, the regulations may require you to keep every one you catch.
- Ice-out is the window. Miss it and you need downriggers, not a fly rod.
- In some western lakes they are invasive and you may be required to kill them. Check first.
- Deeply forked tail and pale spots: lake trout, not brook trout.
Flies that work for lake trout
Each of these is a card in the deck, and each has a full page in Our Fly-brary.
Keep reading
- How to release a trout — handling, and why it matters more for some species than others
- How to read water — where each of these fish holds
- Hatches and what trout eat — the food these fish are feeding on
- Fly fishing by state — which species you will meet, state by state
Rainbow Trout Brown Trout Brook Trout Cutthroat Trout Steelhead Bull Trout Golden Trout Arctic Grayling Dolly Varden Tiger Trout Mountain Whitefish